


Paper Spring

by a_pocket_full_of_fancy_words



Category: Star Trek, Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Academy, Child Loss, Depression, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-12
Updated: 2013-12-12
Packaged: 2018-01-04 11:41:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,693
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1080601
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/a_pocket_full_of_fancy_words/pseuds/a_pocket_full_of_fancy_words
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It breaks him and it breaks Jocelyn, and in her grief she takes everything. It doesn't matter, though, because everything cannot touch the value of one paper spring. He doesn't blame her, and for all her rage, she doesn't blame him. She could have killed him, and it wouldn't have mattered, because their little girl, their reason for being, was dead.<br/>____________________________________________________________________________________________</p><p>Bones loses his daughter before his divorce, and his arrival on the shuttle from Riverside. It's not something anyone can ever fix, but God only knows, he needs Jim to try.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Paper Spring

One day she was there, and the next she wasn't. All that was left were holos and memories and the debris of human existence.

Little fingerprints in the condensation on the shower screen when he finally got into the shower. On his desk, a “spring” made of two strips of paper. Things that could be cleaned off and thrown away, every bit as tangible as his little girl, destined to fade out with time or get lost.

He kept the paper spring, had it with him everywhere – an insignificant moment slowed temporarily to a halt in a six year old's geometry, carrying her touch with him when he left the apartment, holding it in his pocket where once he held her hand.

It breaks him, and it breaks Jocelyn, and in her grief she takes _everything_. It doesn't matter, though, because everything cannot touch the value of one paper spring. He doesn't blame her, and for all her rage, she doesn't blame him. She could have killed him, and it wouldn't have mattered, because their little girl, their reason for being, was _dead._

He takes it with him to Iowa, a new job at the hospital in Iowa City, and when he gets there he sets it in resin, half extended, to preserve it against the everyday wear and the sweat of his palms. No longer a spring, a caricature of the double helix in greying white set into a pebble that warms with his palm. He drills it out with a laser scalpel and wears it round his neck, desperate to immortalise this small part of her that he has left.

He has the image reduced to a 2 dimensional pattern, rendered in ink above his heart, and the tattoo artist laughs at his tears; he doesn't want to tell her that they're not for the needle. He only cries for his little girl, Joanna, who should be laughing and crying still.

He doesn't stick with that hospital job; he can't work in an ER, pouring the life into other people's children when he couldn't do it for his own. So after three months, he takes the first shuttle to Riverside, and from there he takes a shuttle to the only place he can guarantee he won't be fixing kids, picking up a new best friend on the way, and palming the paper spring hanging from his neck as he quakes in fear from the flight.

All he has left is his bones, and one paper spring. But Jim can't have that.

Five months after his baby dies, he's enrolling in Starfleet Academy, signing himself up to leave this place behind, and his old life with it.

 

His room mate gets sick of him crying himself to sleep at night; Leonard gets home one day to find all their things gone; an unoccupied wardrobe next to his, the other bed stripped.

Two days later, the boy in civvies from the shuttle is transferred in, smiling, golden, alive in a billion ways Leonard isn't, maybe, he thinks, never was.

 

Quite improbably, Jim seems to have few friends and no lovers that last longer than a night. They are quite matched in their loneliness, if nothing else, and they seek to soothe it as best they can.

They don't fuck right away; they watch action movies and eat replicated pizza, something that the health conscious boy and then med student, father, doctor, Leonard had once been had never done, and something he was pretty sure Jim was too isolated to have dreamed of. They pretend everything is normal, even when this had never actually _been_ their normal.

 

The ache Joanna left dulls but never leaves; the thoughts he has about her hurt less so long as he doesn't let them, but they never thin out. When people say they think about their dead loved ones every day, they aren't exaggerating; they do not forget. The loss hangs over him, acknowledged, until it becomes so normal to him that he cannot identify the discomfort it causes, cannot remember a time before the sickening realisation. He remembers finding out, though, remembers crying out, his belly flipping, remembers the denial, pleading, Jocelyn's rage. When he showers, tears mix in with the water and he talks to her, fingers slipping in condensation, writing letters she'll never read. Jim, he's sure, does read them, when they show up against the next clinging of water vapour, but he never says anything.

 

The worst passes, but there are still times when the loss chokes him, tears out his hair and scratches his scalp. Jim doesn't see those times at the Academy.

He never asks about Bones' tattoo, or the paper spring in its artificial stone. Never asks about the past, and Bones doesn't tell him. Part of him feels this is a betrayal of Joanna, a denial of her memory, but the depressed part of him whispers lies in his ear about attention seeking, how he doesn't deserve Jim's pity, how he is a burden and how Jim doesn't care. Even when watching football games becomes holding hands and watching stars, cuffed ears become kisses, they don't talk about the time before, either of them.

It happens one evening, when Jim is in and Bones is out, working the late shift at the hospital. The necklace is on his bedside table, the chain threaded through his mother's ring to keep it safe from the weirdos and the trauma patients and the inevitable lawsuit that results from leaving one's personal effects in someone else's colon, when their dorm burns down.

The fire starts in the room below theirs, and travels so fast that Jim is lucky to escape with his life and only moderate damage to his lungs from smoke inhalation and second degree burns to the palm of one hand; Leonard is not his doctor in the ER, but he's there the next day whilst Starfleet is setting up emergency accommodation for those displaced.

Jim is awake, sitting up in bed, even though he looks awful, grey and bloodless. Bones grabs his face, kissing his oxygen starved, purple, cracked lips and peering into those bloodshot, blue eyes.

“Jim, you're okay.” He groans against his lover's neck, even though he'd made sure to find this out the moment he'd heard about the fire.

Jim squeezes him back, but he's too weak to do anything but flop back down onto the uncomfortable bed and into the arms of morphenolog and regenerative but soporific drugs.

 

Caught up in the knowledge that he hasn't lost Jim, it takes Bones a while to realise what he has lost. It hits him like a starship crashing to Earth and knocks the wind out his lungs. Jim is putting the clothes they bought on the way home from the hospital into their new but temporary hotel wardrobe – courtesy of the Academy – but all Leonard can do is let out a single groan as all that air leaves him and collapse onto the bed.

“We've lost everything! Everything...” He gasps into the ugly maroon blanket. It's not really everything he's lost. It's the only thing, the only thing he has of her. The only thing he has in the world other than Jim.

Instead of coming to comfort him, Jim is rummaging around in the bags, as though to prove that they've managed to get something back, but it doesn't help.

“Hey Bones?” Jim's weight settles onto the bed, and Leonard resists falling into the dip and letting Jim see the fresh grief that's spilling down his cheeks, a second loss hand in hand with a betrayal of his little girl, of not even realising that he didn't have her with him. “Bones?”

If Jim carries on speaking, McCoy's sobs drown it out, rocking his body even as Jim strokes his back to steady it.

Jim works a hand under his face and presses something cool and plastic against his cheek.

“Bones,” He whispers, close in his ear. “Bones, I found something of yours I brought from the dorm.”

Leonard cracks an eyelid, reluctant against disappointment and more misery, but there it is, hanging from Jim's palm, a ring on top of a resinous stone, perfectly clear despite the fire, with a single tattered, yellowing paper spring.

“Jo!” His voice cracks as he shouts, taking the necklace and pressing it against the tattoo on his chest, curling in around it. “Joanna, I'm so sorry baby! I'm so sorry. Daddy'll never leave you again, Jo. I'm sorry, I'm so sorry.”

Jim wraps his arms about him and rocks him as he weeps. “It's okay, Bones. It's okay. She's here.”

Bones cries until there's nothing left, and then whines weekly with after-sobs, clinging to Jim and to Joanna.

Eventually, they're lying on the bed, Leonard half cradled in Jim's chest, sporadically making his chest sticky with salt crystals that chafe at his cheek, both of them puffy and red. “When she was born, we were so proud.” He whispers, barely audible. “She was so perfect. Most beautiful thing I ever saw. I'd never loved anything as much as I loved Joanna. Ten tiny toes, all wrinkled up, blue in the whites of 'er eyes.” He sobs once before continuing. “A week after her sixth birthday, her heart just stopped. In her sleep, no reason why. We didn't even realise she was dead till the next morning. She always... She always came to wake us up. At the crack o' dawn. Quarter to six, she'd be there. Bouncing on the bed, askin' for breakfast. Wanting to be entertained.” His fingers dig bruises into Jim's arm, but like so many things before, neither of them acknowledge it. “When it got to six thirty, and she hadn't come to wake us up, I got up to check on her. And there she was. Dead in her bed, with her stuffed dog still... cuddled up beside her.”

He dissolves into breathless, hoarse sobs that Jim hushes with meaningless sounds.

It hurts, but he'll carry on, because he has Jim pressed up against him, and Joanna in his hand; just where the three of them belong.

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you enjoyed this and that I've broken you less than I broke Bones. 
> 
> I'm also looking for someone to beta a slightly longer McKirk story, although I might be pretty slow about sending you chapters - let me know if you're interested. (This other one is not a tragedy, but is also an Academy fic, involves Joanna and revolves around Jim's bad experiences of parenting vs. Bones' loving ones.)


End file.
